The Liberation of Francis Ford Coppola

The Coppola with the hot new movie isn’t Sofia. Thanks to his wine-food-and-resort empire, Francis Ford Coppola has finally freed himself from Hollywood, directing his first film in a decade—Youth Without Youth—completely on his own terms.

The now independent filmmaker, photographed recently in Los Angeles—the belly of the beast. Photograph by Robert Maxwell.

Visiting Francis Ford Coppola one day this summer on his impossibly picturesque 1,650-acre estate in the Napa Valley, where 235 of those acres are planted with grapevines whose fruit was ripening in the noontime sun—the morning fog had just started to burn off—I couldn’t help thinking that Orson Welles should have made wine, too. He only got as far as shilling for it in those corny old Paul Masson commercials that were endlessly parodied in the late 70s and early 80s. (Oleaginous basso voice: “What Paul Masson said nearly a century ago is still true today: We will sell no wine before its time.”) Welles died in 1985 at the age of 70. He spent his last decades scrounging for money to complete unfinished films, scrounging for more money to initiate new ones, and debasing his talent by acting in god-awful movies, TV shows, and commercials—shortly before his death he provided the voice for Unicron in the original, 1986 Transformers movie—in order to keep his head above water. This was not the ending anyone aside from William Randolph Hearst would have wished on him. Coppola, for his part, is now 68. It seems fair to say that he is one of the few American film directors who can match Welles both for talent and for showmanship—for sheer cinematic nerve. Like Welles, he is also no stranger to grandiosity, bunkum, overreach, self-immolation, and red ink. Unlike Welles, and thanks in no small part to those vineyards, his story looks to have a happier dénouement.

This December, Coppola will release his first film as a director in 10 years: Youth Without Youth, a romantic parable with a strong metaphysical bent. It will almost certainly prove to be the strangest mainstream movie of the year, with a narrative that dances along the sometimes slippery borders between waking and dreaming, reality and imagination, being and not being—the parameters of that slippery thing we call human consciousness. If that’s not theme enough, the film also bats around notions having to do with time and language. Plus Nazis. If it sounds Eastern European, it is: Coppola adapted the film from a Romanian novella and shot it in Romania and Bulgaria, in English, with a largely Romanian cast and crew. The protagonist—a 70-year-old professor at the end of a bitter life who becomes 35 again after being hit by lightning—is played by the gifted but not exactly bankable English actor Tim Roth. His co-star, as the woman whom the professor loved in his youth and whom he meets in a different incarnation in his second youth, is the Romanian actress Alexandra Maria Lara, who played Hitler’s secretary in the 2004 German film Downfall. Matt Damon is in one scene as an American spy. Bruno Ganz, who 20 years ago starred as the angel in Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, may be the only other cast member known to a measurable number of Americans.

Coppola has made a defiantly old-fashioned movie in the sense that it would probably have found a larger audience if it had come out alongside Blow-Up in 1966, when serious people would have argued about its meaning. Maybe they will in 2007, too, but maybe they’ll just shrug, or simply not go. I’ve seen the movie twice and am still not entirely sure what to make of it. The philosophical stuff is a hash (at least to me; I’m no better with metaphysics than I am with regular physics), but the less heady parts of the story are moving, exploring as they do questions of work and love, aging and loss. The film as a whole unfolds with a feverish yet precise urgency—the work of a master. It’s as if the Coppola who made the first two Godfather films, with their exquisite sense of control, somehow merged with the Coppola who rode the crazy last third of Apocalypse Now like a rodeo cowboy on a bucking bronco, hanging on for dear life as Marlon Brando lay around in the shadows spouting Eliot and swatting at flies. Coppola says Youth Without Youth is exactly the film he wanted to make, and it must be; it betrays not a molecule of commercial calculation, and for that it’s heroic.

Financial independence from Hollywood—that’s what a private company with half a billion dollars in revenue last year (Coppola’s figure), built on wine, but also including cigars, a line of prepared foods, two restaurants, and three Central American resorts, will buy you. The director, taking profits from his various enterprises, financed the movie himself, underwriting a budget somewhere south of $20 million—the cap, Coppola says, on what he can afford to spend, and theoretically lose, on a film. He got a little help by pre-selling the film to distributors in Italy and France. Still, this is a significant accomplishment for a man who is quoted in Peter Biskind’s book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls saying, “It takes no imagination to live within your means.” Perhaps anyone who has ever picked up a bottle of one of Coppola’s popular Diamond Collection wines—claret, Syrah-Shiraz, Malbec, Merlot, Zinfandel, Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, or Sauvignon Blanc—should be considered an executive producer of Youth Without Youth.

“I’m no longer dependent on the movie business to make a living. So if I want to make movies as other old guys would play golf, I can,” Coppola told me, as though an eight-figure greens fee weren’t pretty steep. We were speaking on the porch of his office, a small bungalow looking out over the grapes. Dressed with disheveled flair, he wore a white linen suit, rumpled, a bright-yellow shirt, untucked, and bright-orange-red socks. He smoked one of his own cigars, a thin one (like the kind Clint Eastwood used to clench between his teeth in spaghetti Westerns), named for his father, Carmine. (They’re called Carmine Thriftys; you can buy them online in packs of five for $5. The side of the box reads, steal from the best.) Clearly, whatever professional storms Coppola has weathered, whatever personal tragedies he’s survived (including the accidental death, in 1986, of his son Gian-Carlo), he knows how to live. In his expansive, padrone-like splendor, he puts me vaguely in mind of the Sicilian Mafia don from The Godfather Part II, the one that Robert De Niro’s young Vito Corleone guts in the revenge killing that climaxes the prequel half of the film.

O ne thing students of Coppola’s oeuvre will remark about Youth Without Youth is its fairly erotic sex scene—a rarity from a director whose films have been relatively chaste, though many moviegoers well remember Sonny Corleone’s wedding-day tryst in The Godfather. “My films are not known for steamy-hot sex scenes,” Coppola admitted when I brought up this deficit. “Part of the reason is that I’m too shy to ask the girl to do it. You know, even in Dracula”—his 1992 film—“when there was supposed to be these really erotic scenes, we’d make the deals with these girls and say, ‘O.K., you’re going to be naked in it,’ and they’d agree. And then, on the day, she’s in there and she’s too shy. She says her boyfriend’s going to be upset. My son Roman was shooting second unit, and I say, ‘Roman, you go tell her she’s got to take her clothes off.’ And he says, ‘I’m not going to do it. Let the assistant director do it.’ It’s always uncomfortable, and I always end up pulling back.”

C oppola has been less sheepish about trying to claw his way free from Hollywood. In 1969, before he’d even had a big commercial success, he moved his family to San Francisco from Los Angeles, where he’d gone to film school at U.C.L.A. and made his first three movies. He founded his film company, American Zoetrope, at the same time, but it was only recently, after years of taking a battering ram to the system, and sometimes getting battered back, that he finally won his independence, albeit through a side door. He had been looking for a weekend house in Napa in the mid-70s when, in typical Coppola fashion, his eyes got big and he ended up buying the lion’s share of the original Inglenook winery, one of the oldest in the valley and once one of the most fabled. (The 1941 Inglenook Cabernet is widely judged one of the greatest California wines ever vinted; last year, according to Food and Wine, Coppola bought a bottle at auction for $24,675 and drank it with friends.) In the beginning he was in the wine-making only for fun, inspired by his immigrant grandparents, who made wine in their basement. But after buying the rest of the Inglenook vineyard in 1995, he ramped up production to the point where his company is now the 12th-biggest wine producer in the country, by volume, with two wineries—the second is in Sonoma—and a dizzying array of vintages from high-end to cheap but potable. “I don’t consider myself a wine-maker,” Coppola told me. “I’m involved in all of it, but more like a movie director. I mean, even though as a movie director I’m very involved in the music, I don’t pretend to call myself a composer.”

To hear him describe it, Coppola made Youth Without Youth almost on the sly. He claims he didn’t tell many of his friends or associates, or even Eleanor, his wife of 44 years, much about the film until he was well into pre-production: on his first scouting trips to Romania, he took along only his teenage granddaughter, Gia. “And the fact that I financed it myself,” he said, “meant I didn’t have to go to some guy and say, ‘Oh, would you read my script?’ And have him say, ‘Well, if you can get Brad Pitt to do it … ’ And then you have to deal with Brad Pitt, and he has to read it. Some of these guys—Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio—they’re very nice and very intelligent. But, ultimately, they know what’s good for their careers. Leo once told me, ‘Well, I have to be the guy that the movie’s about.’ Of course, he’s totally right. And he’s a very nice person. But you know what I’m saying?” Coppola’s pleasure in having run his own ship was palpable: he seemed as proud of having made the film modestly and efficiently as he was of the thing itself.

“I think the idea of self-financing is always a good thing for him,” says Tim Roth. “There’s nobody looking over his shoulder, telling him when to stop and when to start, or where the story can go or how it should change, and so on. It’s just him. If film is a director’s medium, Youth Without Youth was a good example of that.”

But what independence really means isn’t just the ability to make a film free from interference—Look, Ma, no marketing V.P.’s—but the ability to make the next film as well, even if the current one crashes and burns at the box office; it’s the specter of the unmade films, more than failure per se, that seems to haunt directors. “Most filmmakers can’t afford to try something out that doesn’t work,” Coppola said. “Or maybe when they’re riding really high they can, but then they get a couple of other tries, and then you hear, ‘Well, I’m going to direct a thing for Home Box Office.’ ”

Coppola’s riding-high years lasted a good decade, beginning with the first Godfather film, released in 1972, which established him as the leading light of the so-called movie-brat generation that revitalized American movies in the 1970s. He played big brother and head cheerleader to a group of friends and fellow filmmakers that included George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Brian De Palma. He was the most acclaimed of his peers, pulling off the unprecedented trick of competing against himself at the 1974 Academy Awards as a writer-director-producer of two best-picture nominees, The Godfather Part II, which won, and The Conversation. With the first Godfather he was the most successful at the box office too, until Spielberg and Lucas invented the modern blockbuster with Jaws and Star Wars. Across 1977 and ’78 he flirted with financial disaster, and possibly mental illness, making Apocalypse Now, a film plagued by a famously difficult shoot, which included a set-destroying typhoon and an overweight, unprepared Brando—“a nightmare every day,” as Coppola puts it. (Those nightmares are on vivid display in Eleanor Coppola’s home-movie footage as seen in the documentary Hearts of Darkness.) He survived when the film, two-thirds a masterpiece, was a hit, only to lose his next gamble, which saw him buying his own movie studio, an actual, physical Hollywood lot. In the role of bearded showbiz prophet, he was planning on leading the digital revolution 15 years ahead of schedule, but before he could do that he went ruinously overbudget on his subsequent film, the experimental musical One from the Heart, which proved to be the most resounding flop of his career when it was released, in 1982. He soon declared bankruptcy and sold the studio, but was left with a $25 million debt hanging over his head.

These were his years to flirt with late-period Orson Welles. He went on to make a few more passion projects—including The Outsiders and Rumble Fish, both adapted from S. E. Hinton’s young-adult novels, and both released in 1983—but spent most of the next 15 years working off that $25 million debt, peddling himself as a gun for hire on films that seemed more commercially than artistically ambitious, among them Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), and John Grisham’s The Rainmaker (1997). These films had their virtues, especially in terms of craftsmanship; Coppola has never been a hack. Said virtues are maybe more visible in hindsight, however, because at the time these films left people wondering what the hell they were doing being made by Francis Ford Coppola. His great 70s films had managed to foreground vivid personal dramas against backdrops teeming with political, historical, and societal import—they told great stories and they said something about America (Topic A in the 70s). Coppola directing Jack (1995), a sentimental comedy in which Robin Williams plays a 10-year-old with an aging disease who has the body of a 40-year-old (in this case a very hairy one), was like Goya dashing off a clown painting, although to Coppola’s credit he coaxed as restrained a performance as possible from Williams, given the deep vein of pathos they were mining. It was a too small victory. “The best thing you can say these days about the five-time Academy Award winner,” the Los Angeles Times said of Coppola, reviewing Jack and echoing the critical consensus, “is that he turns out a fine bottle of wine.”

“Other, less resilient people, I think that would have broken them,” says Walter Murch, the legendary film editor and sound designer, who is a longtime friend of Coppola’s and a frequent collaborator (including on the new film), speaking of this period in the director’s life. There are probably a half-million people in Southern California, resilient or not, who would give their left arms to become Hollywood journeymen, but that wasn’t the original promise of Coppola and his generation.

Coppola himself was both disarmingly frank and a touch defensive on the subject: “That’s being a prostitute, in a way, when you’re making films as a job. Someone says, ‘Well, you know, I’ve got a payment of $3 million this October. I have expenses. I have children. I have to get that job.’ Think of how many people are in that position—especially when they have more than one wife. But if I were a prostitute, I would only spend the night with someone I could find something to fall in love with. And that’s what I always did. I can’t say that I ever made any film—that was successful, or unsuccessful, or damned—that I didn’t try to find something that I loved about it.” He took on Jack, he said, because he wanted to work with Robin Williams, whom he considered a genius. He wrote and directed The Rainmaker as an exercise to “learn the magic of Grisham.”

The decade between The Rainmaker and Youth Without Youth wasn’t a vacation. Aside from tending to his various business concerns, Coppola released expanded versions of Apocalypse Now and The Outsiders, both of which improved on the originals; mulled a takeover of United Artists (friends and colleagues were peppered with e-mails asking, “Who should I get to run UA?”); kicked around the idea of a Godfather Part IV before it was nixed by Sumner Redstone’s Paramount; co-wrote a musical workshop based on the original Gidget novel and staged it with a cast of non-professional Orange County teenagers; and was responsible as an executive producer for an impressive slate of films that included Robert Duvall’s Assassination Tango (2002), Bill Condon’s Kinsey (2004), and the three features to date written and directed by his daughter Sofia, who took on the mantle of “the Coppola whose movies you want to see” and who won an Oscar in 2004 for her script for Lost in Translation.

On top of all that, Coppola the elder was also working on what probably would have been the most ambitious film in an often ambitious filmography: a picture called Megalopolis, which he planned to direct, based on an original screenplay that he had been re-writing through literally a hundred or more substantial drafts since the early 80s. It was one of those swing-for-the-fences dream projects, like Scorsese’s Gangs of New York or the unmade Napoleon film that Stanley Kubrick noodled for decades, the kind of project that if it does get made can suffer from incubating too long. Coppola’s was an epic about the efforts to build a utopia in New York, of all places, from the ashes of a financial crisis modeled on the one the city weathered in the mid-70s. (The story’s money angle must have had personal resonance for its writer.) With scripts running upwards of 200 pages—nearly twice as long as a standard screenplay—Coppola held readings with actors including Paul Newman, Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, James Gandolfini, Edie Falco, and Uma Thurman. The film would have tackled all kinds of messy, hard-nosed, real-world stuff, but also airy, philosophical questions, with a nod to ancient Rome. “What I remember from Megalopolis is the big issues—New York City politics, architecture, race, the struggle between past and future—and how metaphysics ties all these things together,” says Linda Reisman, a producer who was working with Coppola on other films during this period. “We’re talking big themes here—the city being rebuilt and a lot of Romanesque characters—complicated and brilliant.” Perhaps it’s a tribute to Megalopolis’s complexity that when an old friend gave Coppola the novella Youth Without Youth, written by Mircea Eliade, a Romanian professor of religious studies who had died in 1986, he looked at its dense surreality and thought, This I can make!

Aside from the conceptual kinks he could never quite hammer out of the Megalopolis screenplay, there was another problem: 9/11. That day Coppola was in Brooklyn, where he had a production office, shooting second-unit material at his own expense in an effort to goose the project along. Figuring out how to tell the story of a reborn New York in the aftermath of the attack proved to be the last straw. “How was I going to write my way out of that one?” he asked. “Already I’m trying to re-invent the language of cinema so it can deal with time and interior consciousness”—the great thing about Coppola is that he says things like that with cheerful unself-consciousness—“and I’m going to make this parallel between America as the historical counterpart of republican Rome. And I realized … ” He paused. “I mean, look at me. My problem in life is ‘too much.’ I didn’t know how to pare it down.”

“He just kept hitting his head against something in that project,” says Murch. “And it was a very expensive film to make, which meant the studios had to be involved. And a film in the $100 million budget range—which I think that Megalopolis probably would have been—then that means: these kinds of actors, this amount of action, this amount of special effects, can’t have this, can’t have that. And if Francis had been, in Hollywood’s eyes, the golden boy he was in the 1970s, it would have been ‘Whatever you want, Francis!’ But, you know, this was Francis coming out of a decade and a half of a more problematical relationship with the studios.”

For Coppola, Megalopolis is clearly the one that got away: “I’ve described my experience with it as like being in love with a woman that, basically, doesn’t want you. When you’re in love with a woman who doesn’t want you, of course, you don’t have her. You don’t have any other woman, either, because you’re so obsessed with her that you don’t invite in, maybe, this nice little girl who wants you and who would be really good for you. So that’s what Youth Without Youth was: the young woman who did want me—or was more in my range.” He laughed.

At times, as he wrestled with Megalopolis, Coppola toyed with the idea of quitting directing altogether, telling friends—none of whom believed him—“Oh, I’m done with it. You know, I love making wine. I get to sit out in the sun. People come by. I can enjoy my family.” I put the question to him with a slightly different spin. Was he ever afraid he’d never make another film? “I wasn’t afraid, because I was trained in the Roger Corman school. I mean, I could make a movie with $20,000. I was more worried about what my place was.” It’s the legacy issue, as George W. Bush knows all too well.

What have you done with your life? That’s a question that haunts many of Coppola’s films from the past 20 years, prostituted or not. Think of Michael Corleone trying to atone for his sins and cleanse the family name in The Godfather Part III (1990). Or the title character in Jack, who has to figure out how to make the most of his foreshortened life. Peggy Sue Got Married—in which Kathleen Turner magically gets to go back to high school, taking with her the sad wisdom, such as it is, of middle age—shares a do-over theme with Youth Without Youth and its lightning-struck hero, one that clearly has personal meaning for Coppola, who has often said he sees his career as a kind of three-decade detour. “The Godfather made me a big shot,” he told me, almost as a complaint. What he really set out to do was make little movie after little movie, like Henry Jaglom, he said. Or maybe—he reconsidered the thought—Woody Allen.

“I’ve been offered lots of movies. There’s always some actor who’s doing a project and would like to have me do it,” Coppola told me, from the vantage point of solvency. “But you look at the project and think, Gee, there are a lot of good directors who could do that. I’d like to do something only I can do. Youth Without Youth is a step to get back to a more personal type of filmmaking, which is what all of us—my colleagues, the people more or less my age—want to do. And wanted to do, from those days in the late 50s and 60s when we saw the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, or Federico Fellini, or Akira Kurosawa, or Ingmar Bergman, or François Truffaut, or Jean-Luc Godard, or Stanley Kubrick. This is the kind of career I wanted, and any of the directors you’re familiar with wanted.”

Of his 70s cohort, I told him, he seems to be the only one right now courting Cahiers du Cinéma raves and risking art-house box office. “You’ve got to have a lot of money to do it,” he replied. “The only one who could really do it, of course, is George Lucas. He has that side of him, and he’s very talented.” Lucas, as it happens, has spent the last 30 years telling reporters that what he really wants to be doing is directing experimental, non-narrative films. (I interviewed him 10 years ago, when his net worth was only $2 billion, according to Forbes—this year the magazine has him pegged at $3.6 billion—and he said he didn’t feel set up enough financially to risk making the money-losing kinds of films closest to his heart.) “I’ve talked to George about it,” Coppola said. “I’m always trying to tease him into making a personal film. And, you know, it’s sort of like those people who are good at two things. Look at my nephew Nicolas”—Nicolas Cage. “He can do an action kind of film and he can do an obscure, weird, performance-art film. He has both those abilities and George has both those abilities. Steven”—Steven Spielberg—“could do it, and has sort of done it. But Steven’s real taste is more—he has a lot of admiration for those personal kinds of films, but what he does he really likes doing and is good at. And they happen to be the kinds of films, you know, all the studios want to make.”

The studios: he can now afford to shudder at the thought. “Even when you take a great artist like Marty Scorsese, working on The Departed”—which the director made for Warner Bros.—“I mean, he had to deal with producers and actors. It must have been sometimes trying: you’ve got to be a little bit of a politician. And it all turned out great, but … ” He paused, then referenced the fine-arts world, the museums and dance companies with their relatively benign corporate patrons: “I always wonder why, you know, Exxon doesn’t just say, ‘Marty Scorsese, just make whatever movies you want.’ Marty’s a little younger than me, but he’s not going to be alive forever. And I’m sure if he gets to make any movie he wants, that will be a very valuable legacy that he’ll give them. But they don’t.” “Them” and “they” presumably being Exxon, or maybe the studios, or maybe anyone who gives artists money without stupid strings attached.

Coppola seemed anxious about the reception of Youth Without Youth—he was reportedly hovering like a stage father at a San Francisco screening for director friends last spring—but at the same time willing to trust in the film as it makes its way into the world. “I realize not everyone is going to enjoy the movie,” he admitted. (It drew lukewarm to hostile reviews when it premiered at the Rome Film Fest in October.) He offered a modest lens through which he’d like people to view the film: “At best you could say, ‘Well, you know, I made a movie, and if you’re curious to see the kind of movie I would make now, then I hope you’d go see it.’ And just take it as that, you know, neither good nor bad, but maybe just—hopefully—interesting.” The hard sell!

“I’m anxious to make another film now, because I feel I have a momentum,” he continued. “You work hard on a movie and when it’s done, it’s done, you know, and you want to go on.” To that end, he’s already in pre-production on Tetro, a family drama about two estranged Argentinean brothers and their father, a world-famous conductor; it’s his first original screenplay since The Conversation, more than 30 years ago. It’s also the movie he thinks should have been his follow-up to that film. Though the screenplay has autobiographical elements—Carmine Coppola was a conductor and composer, but, said his son, “he wasn’t Herbert von Karajan”—the director insists it’s strictly fiction. “This is kind of my Tennessee Williams period,” he told me. “Call it ‘poetic drama.’ I’m going back to the sort of things I wanted to write when I was 25.” As it often seems to be, his face was lit with enthusiasm. Honestly, he looked boyish.